Fertility worldwide continues to fall
On October 8 the U.S. Bureau of the Census released its biannual population report, World Population Profile: 1996 . As always in recent years, the report and its accompanying news release emphasized the growth in population that is expected over the next 25 years — “almost 6.1 billion persons in 2000 and 7.6 billion by 2020.”
The real news was buried within the report: world population growth is slowing down dramatically as births, birth rates and total fertility rates — the number of children born per woman per reproductive lifetime — are plummeting everywhere. Consider these facts:
Only 80 million people (the Bureau estimates 79.6 million) were added to the world’s population in 1996, a drop of more than 7 million from the nearly 87 million added in 1994, just 2 years earlier.
In 1991 the Bureau predicted that “each year during the 1990-to-1995 period about 95 million persons will be added to the world population,” and that this number would rise to 100 million or more early in the next century. In just 5 years time, the Bureau has slashed its estimate of yearly population growth by nearly 20 million dropping it to 87 million in 1994 and now to just under 80 million.
The 1991 predictions of the world’s population in 2000, 2010 and 2020, have been sharply cut by 191 million, 376 million, and 630 million, respectively.
The rate of increase of the world’s population fell to 1.4 percent in 1996. This is the lowest rate in more than 50 years.
The world’s total fertility rate (TFR) has declined to 2.9 births per woman, its lowest level ever. Only a little more than a decade ago in 1985, the TFR was 4.2.
At least 79 nations have TFRs at or below 2.2 children per woman, the replacement rate fertility. No return to an above replacement rate fertility is expected for any of these countries in the foreseeable future.
Among these 79 nations are China, the world’s most populated country, the United States, Japan and nearly every developed nation. Altogether, the 79 below-replacement-level countries represent more than 40 percent of the world’s population.
Although the Census Bureau’s estimates that over the next 25 years “some 132 to 135 million births will occur annually,” this is 15 million less than the 150 million figure given in its 1994 report.
While the number of yearly births is expected to plateau, the number of deaths will continue to rise as populations age, increasing from 54 million in 1996 to 64 million in 2020.
Accordingly, the yearly natural increase in the world’s population will continue to decline, falling by another 10 million over the next 20 years.1
The populations of 15 different European nations are declining, as deaths exceed births. The 15 nations are: Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain and Ukraine.2
Endnotes
1 We believe that the Bureau’s own statistics indicate that the number of deaths will increase at a faster rate and that the yearly natural increase in the world’s population will probably fall by 10 million within a decade.
2 (Somehow the report missed Italy, which has been reporting more deaths than births for each of the past 3 years.)
